19 January 2011

Random Playlist #2 - What I Want (Daughtry, eponymous)

Picking an entrance song for a fight show can be surprisingly difficult. You're trying to encapsulate something that speaks to who you are, all the hard work you've done and what you plan to accomplish in six minutes inside the cage (e.g., beat the other person senseless) all in some catchy, hard-rockin' tune that tells your opponent "Fear me!". That's a lot of pressure to put on a three-and-a-half minute song :).

I discarded some of the more obvious potential choices like Christina Aguilera's "Fighter" fairly quickly. Although it may show up in a future Random Playlist entry, it wasn't what I was looking for in an entrance song - too literal; especially when you're walking towards a cage wearing a boxing helmet and ten-ounce gloves. I like Pink but the songs I looked at, while they had the right amount of attitude, were almost too much just attitude. Don't get me wrong, there is a certain amount of swagger required for this sport but you need to be able to back it up and a song that seems to be based entirely on bravado and waving around half the peace sign was not the message I wanted to send.

(Queen's Fat Bottom Girls was also a contender simply to spread some love for the big girls in the sport but that ultimately went by the wayside as well.)

When it came down to brass tacks, I started thinking about what MMA had done for me and the crux of it was it had really brought me back to God and deepened my relationship with him. About the time I figured that out, I found Daughtry's song. Whether or not he wrote it as a Christian or Christ-themed song is immaterial because the lyrics are pretty dead on in portraying someone (me, in this case) re-finding and then refining their identity in Christ. So, yeah, it fulfilled all my requirements: it spoke to who I was, the work I'd done, and what I planned to accomplish in the next six minutes and the lifetime after that.

(And yeah, it was pretty cool hearing it blare over the speakers as the flash pots went off while I made my trek to the cage, too *g*).